Censoring Books Quotes

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book. ~ Walt Whitman

When a library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me. ~ Mark Twain

There's more than one way to be a girl ~ Lauren Faust

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Yes, books are dangerous. They should be dangerous - they contain ideas. ~ Pete Hautman

If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how then with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books should be forbid. ~ Herman Melville

I spent my entire time reading books and going to the cinema, just to escape. ~ Michael Caine

Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know; I've done it myself. ~ Gore Vidal

While running simple errands I often became hopelessly confused in the maze of crowded, filthy streets that began twenty paces beyond the north gate of the bridge, and as I limped back to my shelves of books I would feel as if I were returning from exile. ~ Ross King

First, people don't read novels off screens, and they don't have a tendency to shell out real money for books when they don't retain anything physically for their money. ~ Jack L. Chalker

The two biggest sellers in any bookstore are the cookbooks and the diet books. The cookbooks tell you how to prepare the food, and the diet books tell you how not to eat any of it! ~ Andy Rooney

There is nothing to say, and the proof is all the books in the world. ~ Marty Rubin

Can you tell me what happened?"
Her lips thinned as she shook her head. "'Tis not a happy tale."
"You have me reading a book about a girl who tries to kill an entire town. Anything else at this point would be a pick me up. ~ Jenny B. Jones

I've drunk Amazon's free Diet Coke. Nothing makes more sense to me than a company trying to make bookselling into a profitable business. I'm not anti-Amazon, and I'm not pro-publishers either. I'm pro-books. ~ Lev Grossman

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases. ~ Mark Twain

But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

What if this is a horrible mistake?" I croaked.
"Oh, it'll be horrible fine, just a bunch of pretentious rich people with shelves of expensive books they've never read. ~ Ruta Sepetys

Well, I've never met an indexer any more than I've met a real writer. I'm impressed." Miss Finch's tone had changed, and she was suddenly leaning toward me, almost half over the counter. "Tell me, do you make any real money at this job, writing indexes for books? ~ Larry D. Sweazy

People don't see this side of me. They don't know I read, like, 800 million spiritual books. Lately I am just really getting into a lot of spirituality. ~ Jenny McCarthy

Sometimes, I'm brave.
Sometimes, I'm just stubbron. ~ Nigia Stephens

And what of Nature itself, you say – that callous and cruel engine, red in tooth and fang? Well, it is not so much of an engine as you think. As for "red in tooth and fang," whenever I hear the phrase or its intellectual echoes I know that some passer-by has been getting life from books. ~ Henry Beston

I think picture books should stretch children. I think they should be full of wonderful, amazing words. ~ Jane Yolen

To me, re-reading my favorite books is like spending time with my best friends.
I'd never be satisfied to limit myself to just one experience each with my favorite people. ~ C.S. Lewis

It's fun to just skim through piles of books in the stacks of a library. ~ John D'Agata

So began my love affair with books. Years later, as a college student, I remember having a choice between a few slices of pizza that would have held me over for a day or a copy of On the Road. I bought the book. I would have forgotten what the pizza tasted like, but I still remember Kerouac.
The world was mine for the reading. I traveled with my books. I was there on a tramp steamer in the North Atlantic with the Hardy Boys, piecing together an unsolvable crime. I rode into the Valley of Death with the six hundred and I stood at the graves of Uncas and Cora and listened to the mournful song of the Lenni Linape. Although I braved a frozen death at Valley Forge and felt the spin of a hundred bullets at Shiloh, I was never afraid. I was there as much as you are where you are, right this second. I smelled the gunsmoke and tasted the frost. And it was good to be there. No one could harm me there. No one could punch me, slap me, call me stupid, or pretend I wasn't in the room. The other kids raced through books so they could get the completion stamp on their library card. I didn't care about that stupid completion stamp. I didn't want to race through books. I wanted books to walk slowly through me, stop, and touch my brain and my memory. If a book couldn't do that, it probably wasn't a very good book. Besides, it isn't how much you read, it's what you read.
What I learned from books, from young Ben Franklin's anger at his brother to Anne Frank's longing for the way her ~ John William Tuohy

I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: "It is a subject on which nothing final can be known." The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.

Blood rushed to my brain; I felt an animating surge of adrenaline, of possibility, of a frontier being pushed outward. Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known. Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge. It seemed to say: whatever you are, you are woman. ~ Tara Westover

The secret ingredient in my books is, there has never been a villain. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.
[Books vs. Goons, L.A. Times, April 24, 2005] ~ Salman Rushdie

You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books? I say 'Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead? ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The shriek cut thinly though the drizzling dimness, holding for a long moment. At last it broadened and dropped to the old. ~ Natalie Babbitt

He did not know why books had not taught him how to talk so other people wanted to listen. ~ Cassandra Clare

It is probably the sturdy influence of the Catholic belief in a Big Plan that accounts for my own enduring faith that you find the books you need when you need them- even if they're not the books you start out thinking you need. ~ Maureen Corrigan

There is no better indicators of character than the books you have. ~ John Dunning

I bring spiritual books with me while travelling. I like books about thoughts and how you see the world. ~ Olga Kurylenko

People love their comic books. ~ Jessica De Gouw

What you believe someone else can or can't do hasn't got beans with the doing. Or lack of doing. Just go back through your history books and you'll discover that just about everything you take for granted today in your daily lives was absolutely impossible not so many years ago. ~ Martin Caidin

I often write two books simultaneously. Usually one of them starts out as a fun experiment designed to give me a daily break from the real book I'm writing. And then that becomes a real book too. ~ Lauren Oliver

Would it not be wiser, then, to remit this part of reading and to allow the critics, the gowned and furred authorities of the library, to decide the question of the book's absolute value for us? Yet how impossible! We may stress the value of sympathy; we may try to sink our identity as we read. But we know that we cannot sympathise wholly or immerse ourselves wholly; there is always a demon in us who whispers, "I hate, I love", and we cannot silence him. Indeed, it is precisely because we hate and we love that our relation with the poets and novelists is so intimate that we find the presence of another person intolerable. And even if the results are abhorrent and our judgments are wrong, still our taste, the nerve of sensation that sends shocks through us, is our chief illuminant; we learn through feeling; we cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it. ~ Virginia Woolf

I realize that people still read books now and some people actually love them, but in 1946 in the Village our feelings about books--I'm talking about my friends and myself--went beyond love. It was as if we didn't know where we ended and books began. Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn't simply read books; we became them. We took them into ourselves and made them into our histories. While it would be easy to say that we escaped into books, it might be truer to say that books escaped into us. Books were to us what drugs were to young men in the sixties.

They showed us what was possible. We had been living with whatever was close at hand, whatever was given, and books took us great distances. We had known only domestic emotions and they showed us what happens to emotions when they are homeless. Books gave us balance--the young are so unbalanced that anything can make them fall. Books steadied us; it was as if we carried a heavy bag of them in each hand and they kept us level. They gave us gravity. ~ Anatole Broyard

I grew up on comic books. 'X-Men' was my favorite team; Wolverine was my guy. At 8 years old, I dressed up as Wolverine with Adamantium claws that I made out of aluminum! ~ Brian Tee

My mother taught me that reading is a kind of work, and that every paragraph merits exertion, and in this way, I learned how to absorb difficult books. Soon after I went to kindergarten, however, I learned that reading difficult books also brings trouble. I was punished for reading ahead of the class, for being unwilling to speak and act "nicely." I didn't know why I simultaneously feared and adored my female teachers, but I did know that I needed their attention ~ Hope Jahren